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Monday, July 27, 2015

The Bully

The
teacher was over six feet tall. He
walked around with a scowl on his face and was always angry with everyone. One
year he was assigned a classroom down the hall from me. By then I knew him well. Suffice it to say I was not one of his favorite
ethnic groups. It didn’t bother me, but
that dislike included the majority of the students that made up our middle
school.

His hate
targeted the young men who looked and acted like street gangsters. Most of those kids were just that –
kids. Some did have more street smarts
than they had school smarts, but their attitude almost always was a front to
cover their inability to do the class work and the homework.

He picked
on those boys in the privacy of his classroom, but when they fought back and sassed
him, it spilled out into the hallway.
The teacher would yell close to their faces, goading them to hit him.
Once they took a jab at him the teacher then had a “legal right to defend
himself.” His anger toward these boys was so intense he relished getting them
into trouble. Most of the boys would walk (or run) away and turn themselves
into the principal’s office; a few would throw a jab and the man (twice,
sometimes three times their size) would then hit them in return. The boy would get expelled for assaulting a
teacher when the administration, the faculty, and the students knew that the
teacher was to blame.

I have
never understood why people go into professions or jobs where they hate the
client or the customer. I have known
doctors who do not like their patients.
I have witnessed many a salesclerk with an attitude. This man hated kids, so why was he
“teaching?”

Though we
closed our doors during class time, we could hear the teacher berating someone every day
out in the hallway.

It got
really bad one day. The man was out of
hand. He was yelling obscenities and
racial slurs at a young man. No one
could teach over the fracas, and I knew what was going to happen next, so I
walked toward the classroom door and started outside.

I smiled
at them and told them that if he did, they were to go get the nurse. Pronto.

I stepped
out into the hall and in my best teacher voice, I yelled, “Mr. X, do you need
help? Should I send for the
principal?”

He
snarled something sotto voce at me but I repeated my offer again. Other doors opened and other teachers came
out. With so many witnesses, the bully
backed off the skinny young teen.

I turned
to my classroom and yelled for one boy to go chop-chop and get the
principal. I clapped my hands at him to
go fast. One of my own lovable thugs
took off in a sprint. I yelled down the
hallway to Mr. X that help was on the way.

Within
minutes, the student and a vice-principal returned; both were running. The boy
was escorted to the office, and the mean old bully snarled at me and went back
into his classroom.

From then
on, I made it a habit to step outside every time the teacher yelled at a
student. He hated me more than ever but I didn’t care. I thanked the teachers who had come to my
rescue and knowing it would happen again, asked them to continue backing me.
The man was twice my size, and did I mention, he hated me? When I asked the
principal and vice-principal why they allowed that man to bully his students
like that, they gave me some spineless answer.

In the
years that followed, while I still worked on that campus, we never taught in
the same hallway again. I was told “he calmed down a little.” I have no idea
why, but maybe he knew that too many of us were on to him. He might bully the kids and the
administration, but some of us (like the kids who took a jab at him) weren’t
afraid to try and stand up to him.